A premium brand that got significantly worse but didn't drop the price? Seems obvious that this is going to be a story about private equity or a similar acquisition, and indeed it is.
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/ has a giant list of these, with a tracker that breaks down hundreds of once-premium brands and the exact changes that the companies that acquire the brands make to make the things cheaper and worse, capitalizing on the good name of the company until they wear it down completely.
- Launch amazing brand with tight/negative margins to drive heavy consumer adoption
- Sell brand to megacorp/PE for hundreds of millions or billions.
- Brand gets "optimized for cost" so buyer gets an ROI.
- By the time the public has soured on the brand, the buyout has paid for itself plus profit.
The solution would be to launch these products with high margin built in, but then everybody scoffs at the cost and you die in the womb.
The unicorn solution is that you actually invent a way of producing the high value thing for very cheap, cheaper than everybody else, so you can compete on price while still having top-shelf inputs. But man, that problem is about 5 orders of magnitude more difficult to solve than simply coming up with a product people will like.
I'm not sure if you are kidding or not, it would be a funny sarcastic remark in the right circles, but if serious, this exact line of thinking is exactly why things like indie-go-go and kick starter are just absolute meat grinders of starry-eyed individuals.
Not "everyone" -- if you're the owner of a successful ice cream brand who spent a decade grinding in the ice cream game, cashing out the brand equity and getting to live on a yacht might feel better.
Or you could just work hard and put your kids through college by making an honest living producing an honest product. Greed is what is destroying our world, and it is also the obvious one-word explanation for what happened to Talenti.
I don't think you are aware, probably because no one wants to hear it, how unbelievably greedy the people you sell stuff to are.
If you think corporations are ultimate incarnation of pure greed, and consumers are clear minded rational actors bringing an honest offer to the table...well, start a business and see
If that's really how you feel about your customers, it may be time to get out of whatever business you're in. To get back to the point, Talenti's loss of quality is in no way related to consumer greed.
The problem that companies like Talenti run into is: a guy starts the company because he loves making ice cream; foodies get into it and make it really popular; once it's popular the average customer is someone who can't tell good ice cream from bad.
And so the founder has a very valuable asset (a brand that is popular) but has also lost the thing he loved about the job (making a specialty product for discerning customers).
There is nothing unreasonable or greedy about exiting at that point. Let someone who wants to run a mature food business do so, and enjoy a well-deserved payout after years of hard work. All the discerning customers who care deeply about quality move on to the next thing, and normies who just like the brand name won't mind the changes.
And if you know the new owners will screw up your ice cream brand, you can wait a decade and do it all over again, leveraging your new wealth, knowledge, and connections to make it easier.
Quite apart from the extreme sloppiness, the person who runs it is a "Development Strategist" in Palantir's sales team. I'd suggest being extremely wary about signing up with them.
And you must ask yourself, is the ability to sell your company to another company a benefit or should there be considerably stronger hurdles for this kind of thing?
> And you must ask yourself, is the ability to sell your company to another company a benefit or should there be considerably stronger hurdles for this kind of thing?
Distribution is a huge problem for small companies. So you almost have to sell to a bigger firm to get beyond a certain size.
or partner with someone who can do distribution? I don't see why that necessitates selling the company. It's like saying the story in my game sucked so I sold it to Disney.
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/ has a giant list of these, with a tracker that breaks down hundreds of once-premium brands and the exact changes that the companies that acquire the brands make to make the things cheaper and worse, capitalizing on the good name of the company until they wear it down completely.